Embodiments herein generally relate to systems and methods that help managers maintain high image quality printing, while reducing maintenance costs by producing an action effectiveness report that indicates which of many historical actions increase/decrease print image quality, and such systems and methods can alter the recommended maintenance schedules separately for each different demographic groups of printing devices based on the historical actions that increase/decrease print image quality.
Modern production management software typically records and presents to a print shop manager information about the production of the machine, or operating conditions of the machine. This approach can sometimes fail to communicate information about image quality, or communicate in such a way that the resulting action is often costly because of unnecessary service calls or excessive parts swapping by the customer.
Further, production management systems allow a manager to monitor the production process and determine if the equipment is running at peak performance. This is done largely by communicating various meters per unit time to the central production monitoring application. The print shop manager can evaluate the throughput and effectiveness of the printing device in terms of the number of sheets delivered.
This type of monitoring assumes is that if a sheet is produced by the printing device, it is a properly printed sheet. Sometimes a successfully produced sheet is not produced due to image quality issues on the printing device. An alternative to this type of monitoring is to send up low-level device information on the effectiveness of the printing process (for example, sending the toner age, or electrical properties of the photo receptor belt). Unfortunately this type of reporting requires the production manager or operators to estimate the image quality health of the machine.
The operator may evaluate the actual image quality of the printing device and determine that it is acceptable for that particular job, paper, and customer. But the low-level device data (e.g. toner age, or electrostatic properties of transfer) might indicate that the printing device is operating in a state where image quality defects are possible. If this information is presented to the customer, the natural outcome is to replace parts (e.g., the photoreceptor belt, or other costly components) which may be unnecessary to maintain a desired level of image quality.